Nine O’Clock Banana

Welcome to Nine O’Clock Banana, the blog with the final and conclusive truth about BIM!

Now you may wonder about the connection between bananas and BIM, and why on earth nine o’clock? Well, when we founded Datacubist in 2009 with my colleague Sakari Lehtinen, he took the habit of eating a banana every morning at nine o’clock, and we had many of our best ideas on his daily banana break. One obvious banana related feature we came up with early on is peeling, the functionality of dragging and dropping objects from a 3D window such that they disappear from that 3D window and appear somewhere else. Peeling is still one of the unique key features of simplebim®, but most ideas were naturally not even remotely banana-related.

What’s the deal with the final and conclusive truth then? We are the first to admit that there is of course no such thing. But we do actually know more about BIM than the average guy and are not easily fooled. I personally started working with IFC in 1997 and have been on that path ever since. We have participated in international standards development, software implementation (including coding), software certification, BIM authoring, using BIM is real projects, process development, research and teaching. By training I’m an architect and Sakari is a structural engineer so we also have a pretty strong industry background. We are something like ‘renaissance men’ for BIM.

The name of our company ‘Datacubist’ comes from the cubist artists of the early 20th century (like Picasso) who “instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, depicted the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.” At that time this was quite revolutionary thinking. In this spirit, we decided to start this blog to share our ideas about BIM with you. Many of our ideas are implemented in the simplebim® application or enabled by it, but this blog is not only about simplebim®. We hope you find our ideas interesting enough and in the best case we can even help you gain a deeper understanding of BIM and all the things around it.